Clarity wasn't exactly lacking, but it may be more clear than ever now why former Rep. Jason Chaffetz was an extraordinarily bad Oversight Committee chairman.
Now that he has officially joined Fox News as a commentator, Chaffetz is free to say whatever he wants and it turns out what he has to say is pretty stupid.
Chaffetz appeared on Fox & Friends this morning where he said the Trumps deserve praise for transparency and Republicans who are still in Congress should call Chelsea Clinton up testify because she did Benghazi.
CHAFFETZ: Yeah, Republicans need to get a backbone. Every time the Democrats say they need to call up Jared Kushner or Donald Trump Jr., then call up Chelsea Clinton. Call up the Clintons. There we have an inspector general who issues a report stating an actual crime. You have Bill Clinton, the former president, taking millions and millions of dollars from countries that Hillary Clinton, who is then going in and doing business. So every time a Democrat says I got to talk to Donald Trump Jr., go up and bring Chelsea Clinton in there, because she was involved in the Benghazi situation. She was involved with the [Clinton] Foundation. I mean, when I tried as the chairman of the [House] Oversight Committee to bring in Ben Rhodes to talk about the Iran situation, nobody knows what the deal with Iran was. They claimed executive privilege. I think the Trumps need to actually get a lot of credit for openness and transparency. They didn't delete their emails, they provided their emails. When they wanted to talk to them, they said you can talk to us. And yet, when we did the same thing with the Democrats they gave us a stiff arm every single step of the way.
Chelsea Clinton has absolutely nothing to do with anything involving Benghazi, or much of anything else concerning our discourse, but whatever. That's neither here nor there.
The idea that Donald Trump Jr. willingly provided his self-incriminating emails deserves special attention because even people who closely followed the situation may not realize that he didn't. Trump Jr. released his emails because the New York Times was about to publish them. He published them himself because he got caught.
When contacted by the New York Times, Jr's representatives responded by asking for more time to comment on them. Rather than do that, they pre-empted the Times and released the emails because they were going to be released anyway.
No one should be under the impression that communications and documents from the Trump regime will be preserved in the long term. Republicans allowed the Bush administration to get away with deleting literally tens of millions of documents (22 million) and they will do the same for Trump. And when that happens, former Oversight Chairman Jason Chaffetz will provide cover for it.